Eating Animals, the searing indictment of factory farming that Jonathan Safran Foer spent three years painstakingly researching, has got the champions of cheap chuck circling their wagons and denouncing the celebrated novelist's latest work as just another piece of fiction.

Chuck Jolley, writing for the Cattle News Network, even questions Foer's very identity, describing him as "supposedly a critically acclaimed author of several books of fiction."

Jolley, a freelance writer based in Kansas City who evidently distrusts Google and Wikipedia, drew from perhaps more fair and balanced sources to conclude that Foer is part of a "chattering cabal of rarely-been-west-of-the-Hudson River or east-of-the-Cal-Berkeley-campus pseudo-experts who travel on the same midnight train to an eco-purgatory where all food is suspect, meat and poultry is particularly deadly, and the evils of factory farming will force us into an unsustainable, doomed lifestyle that will eventually kill our planet."

Slice through the snark and Jolley is spot on, describing the dilemmas posed by industrial agriculture in a nutty nutshell.

Meanwhile, his fellow factory farm defender Gary Truitt over at Hoosier Ag Today bemoans the fact that Foer's book is "being hyped on CNN and quoted widely in liberal newspapers." Truitt takes issue with Foer's claim that industrial ag's excessive reliance on antibiotics--an inevitable by-product of the unhealthy living conditions that are the norm in factory farm operations--is contributing to the rise of drug-resistant pathogens:

The arguments in this book are the same old tired accusations that have been made for decades: modern livestock practices are bad, farmers overmedicate their animals, and this will lead to bacteria that are resistant to drugs. These "super bugs" will then infect humans and kill us all. You would think a fiction writer could come up with something more original.

The industrial meat industry accuses Foer of failing to do his homework. In fact, Foer sent multiple letters to Tyson Foods, "the world's largest processor and marketer of beef, chicken, and pork," as Foer notes, politely asking if he could pay a visit to some of their farms. Tyson never responded to any of Foer's seven requests.

Perhaps this is simply the literary equivalent of Michael Moore showing up in the lobbies of corporate headquarters, doing his patented song and dance with the security guards, pestering them to let him go upstairs and have a friendly chat with The Powers That Be before they throw him and his camera crew out.

In any case, Foer's approach proved to be a similar dead-end. To see for himself just what goes on inside a factory farm, Foer was obliged to seek the help of an animal welfare activist who snuck him into a massive poultry operation in the dead of night. Given the revolting conditions that Foer witnessed himself, and the accounts he provides from others with firsthand exposure to industrialized meat production, you can hardly blame Tyson for ignoring Foer's requests.

As Foer points out, the most appalling aspect of the industrial meat industry is not the more sensational, flagrant animal abuse that's been captured on undercover videos, but rather the chronic, systematic disregard for the fact that animals are living, breathing creatures not intended to be stacked like pallets or made to steep in their own waste on concrete.

Industrial agriculture has done its best to bend these poor creatures to its will, modifying them to better tolerate this style of farming. In so doing, it has created genetic freaks like pigs who can't survive outdoors and turkeys who can't reproduce naturally and have to be artificially inseminated. Can anything truly healthy come from a system where disease, deformity, and environmental degradation are the default?

Foer's intent with Eating Animals is clearly to start a conversation about whether it's necessary, or justifiable, or ethical, to eat animals. He writes favorably of the farmers who rely on more humane and ecologically sound methods of meat production but concludes that, although these operations are infinitely preferable to their factory farm counterparts, some suffering is inevitably inflicted on the animals.

And the fact remains that this kind of pasture-based farming comprises such a tiny fraction of meat production in the U.S. that it's not a viable alternative for most folks. As Foer writes:

We shouldn't kid ourselves about the number of ethical eating options available to most of us. There isn't enough nonfactory chicken produced in America to feed the population of Staten Island and not enough nonfactory pork to serve New York City, let alone the country. Ethical meat is a promissory note, not a reality. Any ethical-meat advocate who is serious is going to be eating a lot of vegetarian fare.

We know, at least, that this decision will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systemic animal abuse in world history.

Ellen Degeneres noted that some folks will surely feel overwhelmed by the suggestion that they should abandon the cheap meat, dairy, eggs and poultry they count on to feed their families.

"How do we take one little step?" she asked Foer.

He answered:

"There is nothing more powerful than an informed conversation, so get informed..talk, talk, talk. Talk about it with your family, don't take these things for granted, don't let corporations lie to you, act on your values."

I sometimes worry about being a "carnibore," as the Ethicurean's ever witty Bonnie Powell describes those of us who are only too happy to hector our friends on the merits of pastured meats versus factory farmed.

On the other hand, a friend had us over for lunch the other day and served a roasted chicken from a local farm. Another couple invited us for dinner and made a stew with beef and lamb from a butcher who sells only local, grass-fed meats. These are all friends who formerly bought their meats at the supermarket; their choices were a direct result of the many conversations we've had about this subject.

Millions of Americans will turn out to vote today, and millions more won't. It's pretty weird when you think about it. Not voting is like going to a restaurant with some friends, and then, when the waiter brings you the menu, deciding that you can't be bothered to look at it, so you're just going to let somebody else decide what you should get.

Of course, hardly anybody ever does this; in fact, we spend an absurd amount of time agonizing over what to order, given how quickly today's soup du jour is destined to become tomorrow's poop du jour.

And yet, though we're willing to engage in a lengthy debate on the respective merits of a reuben versus a blt, many of us won't give equal time to choices that can have reverberations for years or even decades.

Whom you choose to represent you--or what legislation you decide to support--can be a matter of life or death, literally. For example, thousands of Americans die needlessly each year from preventable food-borne illnesses because too many of the elected officials we've entrusted to represent our interests have opted to safeguard corporate coffers rather than protect citizens.

We all have to go, sometime, but who wants to die from eating E. coli-tainted ground beef, as two more unfortunate folks apparently have in the latest outbreak, which will likely cause more deaths before it runs its course? And how many people will be killed by the swine flu epidemic because of government policies that failed to protect us?

I'm not talking about the vaccine shortage. Clearly, that doesn't help, but what's equally unhelpful is our failure to provide paid sick days for every worker. Do you really want the guy who assembles your sandwich or the day care worker who diapers your little darling to show up for work even when they're carrying a contagious disease? That scenario is all too common, as Tuesday's New York Times reports:

...workers who deal with the public, like waiters and child care employees, are jeopardizing others by reporting to work sick because they do not get paid for days they miss for illness.

Our government agencies and employers advise us to stay home when we've got a contagious illness. But until Congress enacts legislation to guarantee paid sick days to every worker, millions of wheezing, sniffling workers will drag themselves into the workplace despite feeling awful because the prospect of losing a day's wages makes them feel even worse.

Legislators have addressed this problem in San Francisco and Washington, but, as the Times notes, "similar measures face obstacles in Congress." Still, despite pressure from powerful business groups to squelch such measures, more than 100 representatives have signed on to sponsor a bill "that would require employers with 15 or more workers to provide seven paid sick days a year."

And that's just one example of legislation that has an impact on how well equipped we are to handle potentially fatal health threats. What about taking steps to prevent contagious diseases like the H1N1 virus from occurring in the first place?

You'd think our health agencies would be hard at work attempting to determine the source of the swine flu outbreak. But as muckraker extraordinaire Tom Philpott noted over at Grist recently, our government has shown shockingly little interest in tracing the origins of the H1N1 virus, which, Philpott notes, is suspected of being linked to industrial hog operations.

Acclaimed author Jonathan Safran Foer, whose latest book, Eating Animals, is a measured but merciless indictment of industrialized meat production, makes the connection unequivocally. As Foer wrote in an op-ed for CNN last week:

Today, the factory farm-pandemic link couldn't be more lucid. The primary ancestor of the recent H1N1 swine flu outbreak originated at a hog factory farm in America's most hog-factory-rich state, North Carolina, and then quickly spread throughout the Americas.

It was in these factory farms that scientists saw, for the first time, viruses that combined genetic material from bird, pig and human viruses. Scientists at Columbia and Princeton Universities have actually been able to trace six of the eight genetic segments of the most feared virus in the world directly to U.S. factory farms.

Foer notes that the rampant use of antibiotics in factory farming is widely thought to be a significant factor in the creation of drug-resistant pathogens:

Study after study has shown that antimicrobial resistance follows quickly on the heels of the introduction of new drugs on factory farms...

...Today, institutions as diverse as the American Medical Association; the Centers for Disease Control; the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences; and the World Health Organization have linked nontherapeutic antibiotic use on factory farms with increased antimicrobial resistance and called for a ban.

It hasn't happened, though, because, as Foer points out, "The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals."

Our state health departments have been doing an abysmal job when it comes to tackling food-borne illnesses, as Reuters recently reported. How can we demand better from our represented officials?

On Election Day, we have the power to support the politicians and policies that are dedicated to protecting us from potentially lethal business practices. Today in Ohio, for example, voters have the opportunity to weigh in on Issue 2, a measure intended to protect the industrialized farming methods that Foer, Philpott, and a wide range of experts have cited as contributing to the disease outbreaks that are becoming all too common.

So, before you decide to blow off that trip to your local polling booth, consider the possibility that you may well be passing up a once-a-year opportunity to support legislation that actually has an impact on your life and the lives of those around you.

Think of your ballot as a list of menu options. Would you like your burger with, or without, deadly pathogens? Do you really want to let someone else make that choice for you?

Colin Beavan's experiment in low impact living compelled him to reassess just about every aspect of our daily lives: how we get around; how we shop; how we stay cool and keep warm; how we entertain ourselves; and, of course, how we eat. The production/distribution of food products uses an extraordinary amount of energy and has a huge impact on our environment. So, for the purposes of the project, Colin, Michelle and Isabella had to alter their eating habits radically.

Once his family switched to eating only foods produced within a 250-mile radius of New York City, the farmer's market became a regular ritual. Such American dietary staples as pizza, take-out Chinese--even peanut butter sandwiches--became off-limits, either because they contained non-local ingredients or generated trash.

The No Impact Project week's in full swing now, and those of us who've signed on are taking a closer look at our carbon "foodprint" today. So I asked Colin to tell us a bit more about his year-long adventure in ecological eating:

KT: Did you know when you embarked on the No Impact experiment that our eating habits play such a crucial role when it comes to climate change?

CB: I knew that the centralized, agri-giants that produced food put good nutrition and people's health very low down on their priority list. After all, they don't profit from our eating healthily; they profit from our eating more. So the environmental and human degradation caused by centralized food production and distribution came as no real surprise to me.

And the problem is not just climate change. There is a 75 square mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the amount of chemical fertilizer washed off American farmland and down the Mississippi.

I like eating locally because the farmers are not anonymous corporations. I can look them in the eye and become friendly with them. I can choose to trust them to make sure that they care for our land, water and climate. And I trust them to provide food I can trust for my little girl too.

KT: You've emphasized in your public appearances--on Good Morning America, for example--that reducing our meat consumption is one of the most significant ways that we can curb our carbon "foodprint." Were you a vegetarian prior to beginning the project? What inspired you to make the shift to a plant-based diet?

CB: Did you ever see the Humane Society video showing the cruelty to the cows in confined animal feeding operations (CAFO)? I'm talking about the video that sparked the largest beef recall in US history.

Becoming aware of the cruelty and the climate impact of the beef industry has done me in forever. I used to have occasional bacon and pepperoni slips, but no more.

Thinking again of the cruelty I witnessed. I can't help but believe that somehow the energy of that cruelty and unhappiness enters the animal and that energy might get passed on to whoever eats it. I don't want my little girl to be the recipient of that energy.

For those who choose not to give up meat though, I know many local farmers who treat their animals kindly. When cattle are raised well in pasture, their manure fertilizes the land, causing more plants to grow and more carbon to be sequestered in the land. This is a way better choice, in my view, than CAFO meat.

KT: You're also a strong advocate of eating locally and seasonally. Critics of the locavore movement have attempted to dismiss it as a single-minded fixation on "food miles." But your impetus for eating locally was motivated as much by your desire to stop generating all the garbage that comes with processed convenience foods and take-out. How do you pitch the ecological benefits of a predominantly local diet to skeptics who've been swayed by anti-locavore diatribes?

CB: Look at the funding for the research that is used to back up the anti-locavore spin and look where it has been published. Often times, [they are funded and published by] chemical giants. The ones that produce chemicals local farmers don't use. The ones that have the most to lose if we change our agricultural system.

But the amazing thing about local food is that it is not just good for the environment. It's better for my family too. The food, itself, is better for us. And Isabella, who sometimes doesn't eat veggies, will absolutely eat them when she has seen where they have been grown.

Local food allows for trust and community relationships. When I pay a farmer I know for food, my money supports something I care about and people I care for. I can't say that when I buy from the frozen food section.

KT: You understandably had a craving for various foods that were off-limits for the duration of your project. What did you miss the most? When the year was up, what formerly verboten foods gave you the greatest pleasure?

CB: Pizza and peanut butter.

KT: In your book, you write that the television used to be the center of your life. When your family gave up the big screen TV, the kitchen table took center stage; making meals became the proverbial "quality time" with Michelle and Isabella. And when your project put you in the media's glare, you found refuge in baking bread.

Now you're out on book tour and promoting your foundation, which presumably doesn't leave a lot of time for treks to the farmers' market, home cooked meals with friends and family, or bread making. As anyone who travels knows, finding fresh, healthy, sustainably grown food on the road can be a challenge (though the Eat Well Guide is working to make it easier all the time!). How are you eating these days, if you don't mind my asking?

CB: Badly. And this points to an important point. It is not always easy to live and to eat sustainably. That is because our major cultural systems--food production, energy generation, etc.--are not sustainable. We have to find ways to live outside those systems if we want to live sustainably.

This shouldn't be so. Our systems should be designed to be good for the people and good for the planet. You shouldn't have to "resist" the temptation to eat from your grocery store when you want to take care of yourself and the planet. Living healthily and sustainably should be as easy as falling off a log.

And that's why just changing our individual lifestyles is an important part of the equation but not the whole equation. Joining in with others to ask for system change via our city, state and federal governments is also important. To do this, finding community in grassroots environmental organizations is a big help.

Two cornerstones of American culture collided Monday night on CNN:
Larry King and cheap processed meat. Or should I say colluded? After all, they've got a lot in common: both smush together scraps of debatable value and dubious origin and extrude them as suitable fodder for our more credulous compatriots. And both have the potential to poison us, whether by tainting our food supply with pathogens or contaminating our national conversation with lackeys and lobbyists.

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.
The topic of King's show was the question "Does a healthy diet include meat?" It seemed strangely fitting to have the King of the MSM (mainstream media) explore the industry that gave us another MSM: mechanically separated meat, "a paste-like meat product produced by forcing beef, pork, turkey or chicken bones, with attached edible meat, under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue."

This method enabled meat processors to minimize waste, use less expensive ingredients and thereby offer us cheaper hot dogs and other processed meat products.

MSM was declared safe for human consumption in 1982. In 2004, the USDA decided that it wasn't, stating that "mechanically separated beef is considered inedible and is prohibited for use as human food."

Why the change? Three words: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, aka BSE or mad cow disease. So, no more MSM in your ballpark frank. Now, you just have to worry about E.Coli in your ground beef, as Michael Moss's scathing New York Times exposé showed. Or do you?

King posed this question to a panel that included: Patrick Boyle, president and CEO of American Meat Institute; Bill Marler, the nation's leading foodborne illness attorney; bacon-loving celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain; and Jonathan Safran Foer, the acclaimed novelist who advocates vegetarianism in his soon-to-be published Eating Animals. King also brought on two nutrition professors, one pro-meat, one anti, a food safety advocate who lost her son to an E. Coli-tainted burger, and a mother whose 7 year-old daughter died after visiting her E. Coli-sickened grandpa in the hospital. Who knew that you could contract E. Coli by coming into contact with someone who's got it?

Anthony Bourdain defended meat eating on the grounds that we're designed to be carnivores:

Bourdain: ...we have eyes in the front of our head. We have fingernails. We have eye, teeth and long legs. We were designed from the get-go, we have evolved, so that we could chase down smaller, stupider creatures, kill them and eat them.

He noted, however, that we are not designed to "eat fecal choliform bacteria":

Bourdain: I think the standard practices of outfits like Cargill and some of the larger meat processors and grinders in this country are unconscionable and border on the criminal.

Jonathan Safran Foer, who gave us a taste of his upcoming book in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, agreed with Bourdain's indictment of industrial meat production but took issue with Bourdain's assertion that it's natural to eat meat:

Foer: I'm not all that interested in what humans seem designed to eat or what is quote, unquote natural, because the entirety of human progress is defying what's natural. If we're so concerned with what was natural, we wouldn't be in this TV studio right now having this conversation.

The thing that's really important that Anthony said is that there's a certain kind of meat, which is produced on factory farms, that is in every single way unconscionable. It's unconscionable to feed to our children because of the health. It's unconscionable because it's the single worst thing we can to do to the environment by a long shot. And it's unconscionable because of what we're doing to animals who are raised on factory farms.

What Anthony didn't say, and I wish he had, is that upwards of 99 percent of the animals that are raised for meat in this country come from factory farms. When we're talking about meat, when we're talking about the meat they sell in grocery stores, when we're talking about the meat we order in restaurants, we are effectively talking about factory farms.

Bourdain conceded that the cheap ground beef that dominates the average American diet is the issue:

Bourdain: My major area of concern is the chopped meat.
You know, supermarket quality fast food quality, pre-chopped meat.
Those practices, if you read the Times article that came out recently on this most recent E. Coli outbreak, it's truly terrifying. The stuff they're putting in these burgers would not be recognized by any American as meat...

Patrick Boyle, the American Meat Institute CEO, gave the obligatory industry rebuttal:

Boyle: I think some of the comments have been grossly uninformed about the industry and our products. This industry, the member companies of the American Meat Institute, of which Cargill is one, have invested tens of millions of dollars over the last ten years in research programs to make our products safer....

...And hamburger is compromised of trim from more expensive pieces of meat like tenderloins and roasts. It's perfectly safe, perfectly wholesome. It's produced under the continuous inspection of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture.

One other comment if I might, Larry. The whole comment about factory farming, from my perspective, that's a negative reference to high volume, low cost, efficient meat and poultry processing facilities, that give Americans an abundant variety of safe and wholesome products at a very reasonable price. The lowest price in terms of disposable income spent in any developed country in the world.

Some nutrition professors might argue that a diet dominated by cheap beef and other animal products full of saturated fats is not such a great idea. In fact, King invited one such expert, Cornell University's Colin Campbell, author of the China Study, to share his view that meat-eating is unnecessary and undesirable:

Dr. Campbell: ...a whole foods plant-based diet really has all the nutrients that we actually need at optimum levels of intake.
And what we learned early in my career, that instead of protein, especially animal protein, being a good nutrient, so to speak, and creating good health, what we learned is that we could actually turn on cancer development by simply increasing the level of animal protein intake above the amount of protein that we really needed. We could turn it off by simply taking it away...

...the conclusion was that the closer we get to consuming a whole foods, plant-based diet the healthier we're going to be on all accounts.

But Dr. Nancy Rodriguez, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Connecticut, disputed Campbell's claims:

Dr. Rodriguez: I believe that when you're looking at living a long, healthful life, that certainly animal proteins, which are the foundation of life and what we do, can fit in that healthful approach. And some of the recent studies, again, from my lab and others, peer reviewed science, using whole foods that include beef, dairy, eggs in the diet, have shown that there is some benefits to the muscle, without any detriment to cholesterol levels, benefits, perhaps, to Diabetes management and high blood pressure.

That's right, eating meat, eggs and cheese doesn't necessarily raise your cholesterol, and may in fact be a useful tool in the management of diabetes and high blood pressure. Huh. That sounded wrong to me, but what do I know? I get my nutritional advice from folks like Marion Nestle and Joan Gussow, whereas Dr. Rodriguez has done all kinds of research that's been generously funded by such organizations as the National Dairy Council, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, and the Egg Nutrition Center.

Dr. Rodriguez warned that we should think twice about reducing our consumption of animal products:

Dr. Rodriguez: ...when you make a choice to eliminate those animal products from your diet, it becomes a challenge, particularly for certain vulnerable populations, such as infants and children, to get those nutrients in.

So, if you need reassurance that bacon cheeseburgers are an essential part of a heart-healthy diet, especially for kids, Dr. Rodriguez is your woman. She's looked into it--with the help of the meat, egg and dairy industries.

You can tell fall's in full swing, all the signs are there: the chill in the air, the fiery foliage, the stores stocked with cheap plastic landfill-ready Halloween tchotchkes that are probably chock full of phthalates, bisphenol A, and who knows what other toxins. Not to mention the lead coated wires on all those light-up spider webs and skulls. And the swine flu's back with a vengeance; will medical masks outsell the usual disguises this Halloween?

Scary stuff, indeed. But the start of the school year creates another frightening dilemma for many parents; how to fill your child's lunch box with something less horrifying than, say, a Kraft Lunchable?

There are plenty of parents who'd rather send their kids off to school with a more wholesome, less processed lunch. And though we all think of October as the season for harvests and Halloween, it's also Vegetarian Awareness Month, which kicks off today with World Vegetarian Day.

So now's the perfect time to get acquainted with Jennifer McCann, the veggie-loving blogger who began documenting the delicious and delightfully inventive plant-based lunches she created for her son on his "first day of school in 2005," as the New York Times recently reported. Thousands of parents desperate for a healthy alternative to the lamentable Lunchables began flocking to Vegan Lunch Box, McCann's website, and trying her recipes, launching her on a new career as a cookbook author.

McCann's cookbooks, Vegan Lunch Box and her latest, Vegan Lunch Box Around the World, may be geared towards children, but they're perfect for anyone--kids or no kids--who enjoys simple, eclectic dishes featuring fresh takes on familiar foods. Her stated goal is "to inspire others to eat more healthy, plant-based meals and move more." I interviewed her recently via email to find out more about how this "bento blogger" became a publishing phenomenon.

KT: How did you first become interested in making bento boxes for your family?

JM: When my son started first grade. I had never packed lunches before, and at first I couldn’t come up with any vegan ideas beyond peanut butter and jelly. Then I asked my son what he wanted for his first day of school and he said “Sushi!” It opened up my eyes and I started thinking of all kinds of dishes I could pack. They looked so cute in his colorful lunch box, I started taking pictures and blogging and doing more things to make his lunches little works of art.

KT: Did you ever imagine when you first began blogging about your son's lunches that your website would find such a wide audience?

JM: Not at all! I thought there would be some other vegan moms looking for ideas for their kid’s lunch boxes, but I never imagined that it would grow so big so fast, with thousands of people checking in each day to see what my son had for lunch!

KT:Your cookbooks offer a culinary whirlwind world tour, with recipes inspired by just about every cuisine under the sun. I know you're partial to Japan, the birthplace of bento, but what other countries' cuisines are among your personal favorites (if you can answer that question without precipitating an international diplomatic crisis?)

JM: Oh, so many! I’m very partial the cooking of Mexico and Africa, especially West African and Ethiopian cuisine.

KT: You've made a name for yourself with your creative, plant-based variations on classic comfort foods like chicken pot pies and corn dogs, as well as more wholesome versions of Twinkies and goldfish crackers. What was your toughest challenge in this category, and which adaptation's been your greatest success?

JM: The toughest was definitely tuna. My son sat next to a boy who ate tuna fish sandwiches every week and he really wanted to have one. We tried store bought fake tuna but he didn’t like it. I finally came up with a good recipe for Chickpea Salad with vegan mayonnaise that makes a great sandwich filling and made him happy, but it’s not tuna.

The greatest success would have to be Twinkies. They’re so much fun and everyone loves them!

KT: You are a fearless promoter of such under-appreciated veggies as kohlrabi and kale. Is there any vegetable that you couldn't persuade your son to eat regardless of how entertainingly you presented it?

JM: Absolutely, all kids have their own tastes. Some veggies, like onions and peppers, my son won’t try in any form. Others, like salad or kale, he’ll only eat occasionally or if I make it a certain way.

KT: Your profile on your website suggests that you're an avid gardener. How much food gardening do you do? Was there anything you planted that wasn't worth the trouble, in retrospect? What's grown especially well for you?

JM: I do like to garden! I have a large vegetable garden in my backyard. Tomatoes grow wonderfully here; I usually can enough tomatoes to last us the rest of the year. I also have great success with zucchini, melons, winter squash, okra, raspberries and strawberries. Brussels sprouts and broccoli have been a disaster -- they get buggy.

KT: Have you ever contemplated working that McCann magic with breakfast or dinner?

JM: Well, we often eat something for dinner and then feature it in a lunch the next day -- leftovers make great lunches! But breakfast almost never changes -- it’s always a smoothie made exactly the same way. I guess none of us are ready for an adventure first thing in the morning!

I'm always amazed by the number of folks who think that most of Central Park is some kind of natural habitat of indigenous plants, a pristine terrain onto which we plunked our bike paths, boathouses and pretzel vendors.

In reality, nearly every square inch of Central Park was painstakingly landscaped back in the mid-nineteenth century to the specifications of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. A massive public works project, it required some 20,000 workers to subvert existing swamps and blow up bluffs to create a soothing pastoral landscape in the English romantic tradition.

Oh, and there was the little matter of evicting the Irish pig farmers and German gardeners who'd built shantytowns on the land. And destroying Seneca Village, the "first significant community of African American property owners on Manhattan". The five acre settlement, which included three churches and a school, was seized through eminent domain and demolished.

All this, so that cooped-up city dwellers could get their fix of "nature". Our civilized way of life is so removed from the natural world that Central Park's manicured, manipulated acres are as close to a bit of wilderness as we can hope to get within the borough of Manhattan.

But you can catch a glimpse of what Manhattan was really like before we invaded it and tamed it by watching the fascinating video that architect/educator Fritz Haeg's created in collaboration with The Mannahatta Project. The video documents Haeg's Lenape Edible Estate installation, which was designed to "provide a view back to the lives of the native Lenape people, how they lived off the land 400 years ago" on the island that was then called Mannahatta.

The Lenape project was installed back in June when Haeg and a team of volunteers descended with shovels and soil on a triangle of uncultivated land in front of a Chelsea housing project to plant the beans, corn, squash, berries, and other edibles that the Lenape tribe lived on centuries ago.

The project offers a "meditation both on the historical facts and the future possibilities for our occupation of the island," as Haeg notes. He hopes that it "may also serve as a model for modest small scale urban edible landscapes and as a possible prototype for future green spaces on similar housing sites across the city."

I'm delighted to see Haeg bring his verve and vision to an American urban setting. His U.S. plantings have been primarily in the 'burbs, as documented in his book Edible Estates: Attack On The Front Lawn (which also includes an installation at a London housing project). Edible Estates, written in 2007 and published in the winter of 2008, anticipated--and surely helped inspire--the recent kitchen garden renaissance. Haeg's book sold so well that it's now out of print.

Happily, a new edition will be released next spring. The new Edible Estates will include more stories of lawn-to-lettuce conversions and an expanded preface from Haeg on how the edible landscape scene has changed since the first edition. Urban ag genius Will Allen's contributing a piece, and there will be a nod to the White House kitchen garden, whose role in helping to inspire millions of new gardeners this year is indisputable.

As Haeg noted in an op-ed this past spring in the Guardian, the First Family's 1,100 square foot patch of veggies is "not just a pretty garden, or an empty symbol, but a place for a family to grow the food that they like to eat, on the land that is around them" (that's why there's plenty of cilantro and tomatillos, for salsa, but no beets--Obama doesn't like 'em). Haeg adds:

Many American children today do not see evidence that food comes out of the ground or experience the pleasure of eating food fresh from plants. Instead their diet is causing epidemic childhood illness. The introduction of a food-producing garden into their early lives is our best hope for changing the situation in a meaningful way.

But there's another compelling reason to start growing some of your own food, whether it's in your yard, on a rooftop, or in a window box: it's one way to help curb your carbon footprint, or, rather, foodprint. No one is seriously suggesting that city dwellers can produce all our own food in our yards, community gardens, or urban farms, but it's just one of the many steps that we can take to lower our impact.

During World War II, planting a kitchen garden was pitched as our patriotic duty. Isn't it time we made growing your own food a civic virtue once again? Only this time, the fight is against the fossil-fueled American life that's given us an increasingly unhealthy populace and an overheated planet.

And we're in imminent danger of losing that battle. "Current emissions trajectories" are hurtling us towards the point of no return, i.e. "the worst-case scenarios" of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to the New York Times.

At a daylong conference on climate change held Tuesday at the United Nations, Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, told the world's leaders that "Science leaves us no space for inaction now".

This bleak pronouncement comes on the heels of a headline blaring "We're Screwed" on the front page of Monday's New York Post--or, rather, a remarkably New York Post-like publication that was passed out to unsuspecting commuters by activists. The hoax was orchestrated by the Yes Men, that pair of pranksters who've so masterfully manipulated the mainstream media, as documented in their upcoming film, The Yes Men Fix The World.

It looked an awful lot like the real thing and fooled a lot of folks. But on close inspection, you could tell that it was a fake because, unlike Rupert Murdoch's publication, "the faux Post is filled with factual information on the threats posed by climate change," as USA Today observed.

Meanwhile, Monday's edition of The Daily News ran an article about the 18,000 pounds of fresh produce that inmates on Rikers Island have grown this year to supply the city's soup kitchens and food pantries--further proof of the tangible, quantifiable benefits of urban agriculture.

The gap between the glacial pace of negotiations and the rapid progress of global warming is now endangering the safety of the planet, scientists are warning. Martin Parry, of Imperial College, London, says: "That is what is at stake. I don't think people have realised. We are nowhere near tackling this."

Can we muster the collective will to alter the way we live in order to avert the worst repercussions of climate change? Those of us who live in densely populated cities already have the advantage of mass transit--and, ironically, greater access through farmers markets and CSAs (though not nearly enough in many communities) to the freshly harvested plant-based foods that form the cornerstone of a low-impact diet.

I don't know if we'll ever manage to liberate ourselves from the petroleum-based processed foods that currently dominate our food chain. But I'm heartened by the sight of so many New Yorkers attempting to grow food, whether it's on the roof of a Brooklyn warehouse or the back of a Brooklyn-based pick-up truck, behind the barbed wire of Rikers Island, or in front of a housing project on the island formerly known as Mannahatta. Let freedom spring!

I have a love/hate relationship with Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man. Used to hate him, now I love him. And his wife Michelle, too.

Not in a menage-a-trois-y kinda way, though. I just really like this smart, funny couple who attempted, for a year, to wean themselves and their toddler Isabella off the fossil-fueled conveniences we all take for granted. This meant, for starters:

~No driving, no flying, or even relying on mass transit. They got where they needed to go on foot, bike or scooter. No more elevators, either; they took the stairs to reach their 9th floor apartment (several exceptions to these rules were made; two train rides to visit upstate farms, and an occasional elevator ride when security measures or double-digit floors in a midtown hi-rise required it.)

~No buying new stuff, except for foods produced within 250 miles of Manhattan. So, no more take-out, out-of-seaon produce, or coffee (though Michelle fought for, and won, a concession on the coffee front). And no meat, because livestock production is such a fossil-fuel intensive process.

~No watching tv; the family eventually went off the grid entirely, playing cards by candlelight and otherwise amusing themselves without electricity.

~No washing machine or refrigerator. Abstaining from these two appliances proved especially challenging, as No Impact Man, the film documenting Colin's endeavor, memorably shows.

The No Impact Project, which Colin conceived--and foisted on an indulgent though leery Michelle and eternally cheery Isabella--was an arbitrary, utterly quixotic endeavor. Colin's intent was, ostensibly, to ask "Is it possible to have a good life without wasting so much stuff?"

Oh, and not incidentally, to make some money off a book and a film that would chronicle his attempt to answer that question.

And it's a question we really need to ask: though we make up just 5 percent of the world's population, we hog roughly 30 percent of the planet's resources, and generate one fourth of the world's greenhouse gases in the process.

But Colin cooked the whole thing up to clinch a book deal chronicling his family's eco-extreme exploits. An article in The New York Times famously branded the project The Year Without Toilet Paper, generating a bit of a media frenzy and leaving a lot of folks, myself included, with the impression that Colin was an opportunistic schmuck.

I dismissed Colin's endeavor as 'conspicuous unconsumption'. In true Holier-Than-Holden Caulfield style I called Colin a phoney, a peddler of 'pseudo sustainable schlock'. I threw in a swipe at Michelle for splurging on two pairs of fancy new boots as a last hurrah before subjecting herself, head to Chloé-clad toes, to Colin's draconian carbon-footprint binding.

Now, with the release of Colin's film, and the book of the same name, it's deja "ew!" all over again. Folks in the media are wasting precious space fixating on how Colin and his family handled their waste--the forgoing of toilet paper, the adoption of a bin of red wiggler worms to compost their kitchen scraps.

This time, though, I won't be piling on to the bash-Colin bandwagon. I realized, after hearing him speak at Cooper Union's Great Hall, that I had been wrong to mock him. I came away from the Cooper Union lecture convinced that Colin's Jimmy Stewart-style earnestness was genuine. I became a fan, a friend, and a defender.

So when No Impact Man co-director Justin Schein asked if I'd be willing to go on the record and explain my change of heart, I said yes. Because, with all the controversy over the effectiveness of Colin's methods, as well as his motives, two things stand out to me:

First, he's infiltrated the mainstream media in his 350.org t-shirt, encouraging folks to eat less meat, take a breather from buying, volunteer with environmental organizations, and lobby their legislators to tackle climate change.

...my hope in living and writing about my year was to put myself in a crucible in which to examine some important cultural issues surrounding our solutions to our environmental crises and the quality of life crisis which is so closely related to them. And yes, I hoped to popularize these important issues.

To that end, Colin's launched a non-profit foundation, noimpactproject.org, whose mission is "to empower citizens to make choices that better their lives and lower their environmental impact through lifestyle change, community action, and participation in environmental politics."

We can argue about how many people Colin will ultimately inspire to make meaningful changes in their lives, but what, exactly, is so terrible about his desire to inspire "massive citizen participation," his stated goal?

Lastly, what's wrong with wanting to make a living speaking and writing about environmental issues? Colin's never claimed to be an expert, simply a layperson who wanted to enlighten himself and others about how our choices affect ourselves, our communities, and the planet.

Isn't there an infinite array of far more objectionable, and harmful, ways to support your family? And there are surely easier ways to achieve financial security than putting yourself in the public eye as a potential figure of ridicule and contempt.

Colin doesn't claim that he's going to change the world, only that he wants to be the kind of person who's game to try. If you are, too, No Impact Man will strike a chord with you.

Otherwise, it may strike a nerve. We've had the Kolbert retort. Stay tuned for the Colbert Report on Thursday, October 8th, when Colin will once again subject his No Impact project to the master of mock mockery. When the No Impact project began, Colbert described it as "like Gilligan's Island, only completely implausible." I'm hoping that this time around, America's favorite faux blowhard will transcend truthiness and reveal that Colin is the real deal.

Any film (or book) that gets Americans psyched about cooking real food can only be a good thing, of course. But when Julie Powell hatched the Julie & Julia Project, latching on to Child's old-school continental cuisine to lift her out of a dreary day job, she hitched her blogger bandwagon to a diet dominated by meat, eggs, and dairy.

Back in the day, that was OK: in Child's era, phrases like "manure lagoon," "gestation crate," "battery cage," or "bovine growth hormone" would have sounded even more foreign than "boeuf bourguignon" or "sauce béarnaise."

But a half century or so later, I'm less excited about dishes that require preheating the oven to 350 degrees than I am about recipes for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to 350 parts per million (ppm). That's the level of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere that scientist James Hansen and Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agree that we need to achieve to avert catastrophic climate change. We're at nearly 390 ppm now.

We won't get back to 350 on a diet of denial and duckfat; a better blueprint for eating green would be meals centered around foods grown through photosynthesis, not fossil fuels--i.e., fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains. But before you can say "Bittman, " I'd like to nominate someone less well-known, but uniquely--and supremely--qualified to be this century's Julia Child.

Meet Lorna Sass, one of America's foremost experts on pressure cookers and whole grains. Think of her as the Ed Begley Jr. of the cookbook world--a pioneer in the art of low-carbon cooking. She's been showing us how to eat low on the food chain for decades with a series of cookbooks that provide all the techniques you need to prepare fast, simple, and satisfying plant-based meals.

And now the truth can be told about 1997's The Short-Cut Vegetarian: it was essentially a vegan cookbook. But back then, nobody knew what vegan meant. So William Morrow has published a new edition with the more accurate title Short-Cut Vegan. In addition to the usual fast, easy and flavorful recipes revolving around beans, veggies and whole grains, it contains tidbits like this:

I'm convinced that quinoa will become the rice of the nineties, as more and more people discover this light, quick-cooking, nutritious grain.

OK, so she was off by a decade or so; her prediction is finally coming true, and the timing couldn't be better for the new edition. Short-Cut Vegan is a lovely little paperback crammed full of easy-to-make, tasty-to-eat recipes, along with plenty of tips on ways to create wholesome dishes in just a few minutes.

The subtitle of Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure is "Two Hour Taste in Ten Minutes," and therein lies the secret to Sass' ecologically savvy cooking. With a pressure cooker, you can whip up all kinds of beans, grains, soups, stews, curries, chilies, risottos, whatever, in a flash. In the time it takes to get take-out, or have a pizza delivered, you could throw together a tasty, wholesome meal using fresh ingredients instead.

Sadly, the pressure cooker suffers from a terrible PR problem. Most Americans seem to think it's some kind of culinary IED (improvised explosive device). Mention the words "pressure cooker" to just about anyone and you're liable to get an apocryphal anecdote about the time Grandma's old-school jiggle-top pressure cooker exploded and left spaghetti sauce on the ceiling.

But there's a whole new generation of pressure cookers that are totally safe and easy to use. And with the publication in November of the 20th anniversary edition of Sass' long-out-of-print Cooking Under Pressure, you'll have the definitive guide to help you master the art of low-carbon cooking.

What Julia Child did for meat, eggs and dairy, Lorna Sass does for fruits, whole grains and vegetables. Now, if only PBS--or the Food Network, or whoever--would give this warm, witty, down to earth woman the opportunity to share her wisdom with a wider audience. In our climate-challenged era, it's time to bid farewell to the French Chef and bring on the Fresh Chef. And it's gonna be sunny Sass, not Rachel Ray.

Just Food is framed as the lament of a lapsed locavore, a simple, sustainably minded guy who's been driven into the arms of Agribiz by food mile militants who, according to McWilliams, number in the millions. These legions of rabid locavores are abusing their purchasing superpowers in a diabolical plot to deprive the world of out-of-season strawberries, genetically modified monocrops, and other wonders of industrial agriculture. In fact, the original subtitle of McWilliams' book was How Locavores Are Endangering The Future of Food And How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.

After it was pointed out by Marion Nestle and others that the study McWilliams relied on to bolster his argument was funded by the National Pork Board, the Times amended the op-ed with an "oops, we goofed" editor's note admitting that McWilliams should have revealed his source.

McWilliams does nothing to repair his credibility with Just Food, which contains enough straw men to build a straw bale house. He trots out a tiresome twist on the mythic cadillac-driving welfare queen: the SUV driver with the self-righteous hemp shopping bag who routinely drives miles out of her way to purchase locally grown heirloom tomatoes. Just Food also poses hilariously boneheaded questions such as:

What would happen to local traffic patterns if every consumer in Austin made daily trips in their SUVs to visit small local farms to buy locally produced food?

When he's not scratching his head over such pointless ponderings, McWilliams is busy bending over backwards, and then some, to advance his contrarian schtick. Folks like Michael Pollan are fond of noting that the farmers market is the new town square, where eaters and farmers meet up and have meaningful exchanges, as opposed to the soulless commerce of the supermarket.

But things are not so sunny in the parallel universe where McWilliams researched his book; according to him, farmers' markets are a potential hotbed of civic unrest where a shortage of gourmet produce is liable to spark ugly disputes between haute chefs and home cooks.

I've been going to New York City's Union Square Greenmarket several times a week for literally decades, and I have yet to see Greenmarket regulars/celebrity chefs Dan Barber or Peter Hoffman come to blows with other buyers over who'll get the last bunch of baby fennel or Japanese turnips.

Moreover, I don't know anyone who actually attempts to adhere to a strictly local diet, unless you count Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, who limited his family's diet to local foods for a year as part of his experiment to minimize their carbon footprint.

But food miles were only one part of the equation for Beavan, as the film about his endeavor makes clear; of equal importance were the relationships he formed with the farmers and other vendors at the Greenmarket and his desire to eliminate excess packaging from his food purchases.

McWilliams ignores both these aspects of buying local and dwells obsessively on food miles, presumably because he couldn't acknowledge these benefits of shopping at farmers' markets without undermining his own arguments. This pattern is repeated throughout the book; McWilliams selectively cites the facts that support his claims and omits those that don't. The valid points that he does make--organic doesn't necessarily mean toxin-free, biotech could be a boon in non-corporate hands, aquaponics offers a sustainable source of protein--get lost in this cynical, sales-grabbing shuffle--collateral damage in his war on locavores.

It's too bad, because, sandwiched between the caricatures of loco locavores and McWilliams' hey-ho-GMO cheerleading, lies the meat of the matter; we can't go on eating animals at our current consumption levels, regardless of whether they're raised in factory farms or on grass.

In chapter 4 of Just Food, "Meat--The New Caviar," McWilliams tallies up the cost of our unprecedented appetite for animal products and concludes:

Environmentalists who ignore the ecological costs of producing meat are in denial of one of the greatest threats to the world's ecosystems and to the prospect of eating ethically.

As responsible consumers, we really have no choice but to confront the reality bluntly articulated by World Watch: "It has become apparent that the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future." Unlike so many other environmental issues, our response here can be direct and personal. As Gidon Eshel, a geographer at Bard College, writes, "However close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet."

And therein lies the needle in McWilliams' hyperbolic, straw man-stuffed haystack: if you want to eat ethically, ease up on the meat, dairy and other animal products. McWilliams evidently made the calculus that it would be more lucrative to demonize farmers' market fanatics than mindless meat eaters, but his opportunistic posturing ultimately overwhelms the more thoughtful analyses contained in this book. Just Food is a tedious, tendentious read that doesn't compel and probably won't sell.

Earth Days, the new film that opens this weekend from acclaimed documentarian Robert Stone, is being promoted as a history of the environmental movement in the United States. But it's more of a road trip, really: the road less travelled. The road not taken. The road to hell, blazed by grassroot good intentions that got asphalted and AstroTurfed.

Stone's skillful blend of archival footage and new interviews with the environmental movement's founders documents a movement still in its infancy when an oily alliance of extraction-happy industrialists and the Don't-You-Dare-Ask-Americans-To-Care contingent conspired to smother it in its crib.

The movement survived, but it didn't thrive. Next year marks Earth Day's fortieth birthday. Will it be a milestone, or a millstone? Earth Days depicts the birth of a movement that started with so much promise but ran aground on the shoals of shallow self interest, blithe indifference and callous greed. It's Stone's fervent wish that if enough folks turn out to see Earth Days, we might be able to get this boat floating again.

When Rachel Carson published her seminal Silent Spring in 1962, the chickens came home to roost and discovered that in the mad dash to feather our nests we'd done a fine job of fouling them, too. Carson's watershed work got the ball rolling, but it took the acid-inspired global vision of Stewart Brand, who published the ground-breaking Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, to popularize the notion that we've only got one Earth and we might want to stop stomping on it.

The movement really picked up steam in 1970, when 20 million people turned out across the nation to celebrate the first Earth Day. It was the first time in our history that we began to grapple with the reality that no country, no matter how big or how bold, has infinite resources.

...it also illuminates the historical fact that positive changes in social attitudes, technological possibilities and political determination can take place very rapidly if the will exists to make it happen. We were halfway there a generation ago, but then we lost our way. As we at last begin anew to tackle our many environmental challenges, it's vital to know how we arrived at this predicament and what lessons from the past we can draw upon in facing an uncertain future.

That is why I made this film, and why I made it now.

Earth Days hits awfully close to home for me, and not just because Stone happens to live a stone's throw from me in our mass-transit accessible Hudson Valley hamlet. Growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, I felt acutely alienated by our car-centric community; the only time my dad ever spanked me was when he caught me throwing rocks at passing cars. Some guy I hit pulled over and tattled on me, and my dad got so mad he paddled my auto-hating ass.

Earth Days is a thoughtful, entertaining film that documents pivotal peaks and low points in the environmental movement. You really ought to see it, if only to catch a glimpse of a rare species that's nearly extinct now: the pro-conservation conservative. To borrow a famous phrase from the first President Bush: Message--they cared. Will we?